Goldberg: Donald Trump owes ’17 wins to GOP, generalsBoston HeraldTrump is the most unpopular first-year president in American history, for reasons far beyond mere bad press. Still, among conservatives, the tally of wins has sparked some intramural debates. The most prominent one is how Trump skeptics and avowed …

What It’s Like to Betray Antifa to the Copsand Get CaughtWillamette Week
An exuberant 20-year-old with short, dyed-blue hair, Tan, whose legal name is June Davies and who identifies as gender non-binary, felt a magnetic pull to the left-wing protests in Portland that followed Donald Trump’s election. Two days after the 2016…

Other Views: Congress sends clear message to world’s thugsYakima Herald-Republic
She headed a powerful organized crime syndicate that leveraged state actors to expropriate businesses, monopolize markets, solicit bribes, and administer extortion rackets. There should be more to come. In passing sanctions against Russiafor …

Brian Klaas: Trump’s behaviour is scarily similar to these 3 modern dictatorsBusiness Insider
With the nepotism and various aspects of this I use the example of Uzbekistan’s dictator who hired his own daughter for a variety of different roles to be the soft face of the regime and you see this with Ivanka Trump who’s deployed to be this softer
Brian Klaas: Trump is not a despot but I call him a despot’s apprentice because he’s borrowing and mimicking tactics that you normally find in authoritarian states. In each of the chapters I highlight one of the despots that he is behaving like, some…

Trump isolating the US, from Asia to the MideastLas Vegas Sun
It’s hard to know where Trump is in worse trouble, but he’s definitely getting on the wrong side of China’s President Xi Jinping with a lengthy foreign policy declaration castigating China for just about everything from unfair trade practices to …

The KGB Papers: How Putin Learned His Spycraft, Part 1Daily Beast
This is the first of a three-part series based on never-before-published training manuals for the KGB, the Soviet intelligence organization that Vladimir Putin served as an operative, and that shaped his view of the world. Its veterans still make up an …

Who’s Winning Trump’s War With the Press?Politico
In May 1973, Walter Cronkite opened the CBS Evening News with an item erroneously implicating a Bethesda bank run by Pat Buchanan’s brother in Watergate money–laundering. The AP falsely reported that [John] Ehrlichman was present at a key cover-up …

Politicians, and others in positions of power, should stop corroding civil discourse and seek to unify society, the former US president Barack Obama said in a rare interview conducted by Prince Harry for BBC Radio 4s Today programme.

Russian Cyberattacks On US ContinuingHartford Courant
Russia’s use of social media as a political weapon will continue, and more countries will follow suit until deterrence is established. The sanctions that the Obama administration and Congress put in place in the aftermath of the 2016 election are…

A clear message to the thugs of the worldThe Bakersfield Californian
Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian tax lawyer, died beaten and alone in a Moscow prison cell eight years ago. He was ill and neglected. He had exposed the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars by a corrupt cabal, and he paid for it with his life. Now, in a …